Published by Starstatement / Celebrity StatementsKarl Otto Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, Germany. He has claimed he was born in 1938; however it has been reported that he was actually born in 1933 (according to the local christening register); indeed the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag has quoted his former teacher and classmates as confirming the earlier date. He is known to insist that no-one knows his real birth date: Interviewed on French television in February 2009, Lagerfeld said that he was "born neither in 1933 nor 1938." His older sister, Martha Christiane (a.k.a. Christel), was born in 1931. Lagerfeld also has an older half-sister, Thea, from his father's first marriage. His original name was Lagerfeldt (with a "t"), but he later changed it to Lagerfeld as "it sounds more commercial." Karl's father is from Vladivostok, Russia; his mother is from Berlin, Germany (according to "Lagerfeld Confidential", Marconi Rodolphe, 2006). Though Lagerfeld has stated that his father was Swedish, journalist Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall (Little, Brown, 2006) established that Karl's father, Otto Lagerfeldt, who made his fortune introducing condensed milk to Germany, was indeed German. According to Drake, Lagerfeld's mother, Elisabeth Bahlmann, was a lingerie saleswoman in Berlin when she met her husband and married him in 1930. Source: Wikipedia